Touch-sensitive devices, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable multi-use devices, etc., have grown in popularity over the past few years, along with other traditional touch screen displays. Touch-sensitive devices, comprising a touch-sensitive display screen can allow a user to interact directly with content displayed on the display, rather than through an intermediary, such as a hardware QWERTY keyboard, and can allow the device to have a much larger display by lessening to a great extent the area dedicated to hardware buttons. Touch-sensitive display screen devices generally comprise virtual soft keys (e.g., icons displayed on the display) and touch sensors, integrated into a display, that detect a presence and location of a user's touch within the display. Software can correlate the location of the touch to an icon displayed in the vicinity of the touch to determine what a user intended to select. Several manufacturers of touch-sensitive display screen devices have opted to eliminate or substantially reduce a number of hardware keys integrated into touch-sensitive display screen devices. Instead, they typically utilize soft keys that can be selectively displayed on the screen (e.g., when user input is desired, the user touches the displayed icon).
Another type of soft key that may be used is a display of an on-screen icon placed near an otherwise unlabelled hardware button, which can be updated as desired for various functions, and can be actuated by a user pressing the associated hardware button. Reducing the number of hardware keys, can allow manufacturers to offer devices that are more sleek (e.g., relative to bulkier devices that may have a full, hardware QWERTY keyboard) and/or have a larger screen (e.g., because available space is not consumed by hardware keys). Cost of device production can be reduced as less hardware components may be needed. Additionally, consumers may benefit because the cost of the device may be cheaper and the soft keys may offer more flexibility with regards to key arrangement (e.g., users may switch between a numerical keyboard, a full QWERTY keyboard, a compact QWERTY, and since they generally comprise icons on a touch sensitive screen, soft keys may be added, subtracted, resized, rearranged, reconfigured with different functionality, etc.) than hardware keys.